Conventionally, it is practicable to record a music CD by use of a portable device (hereafter referred to as a PD) such as the Network Walkman (trademark) connected to a CD player. To be more specific, it is practicable to encode the PCM data recorded in a music CD on the basis of the ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) 3 technique and record the encoded data to a semiconductor memory such as the Memory Stick (trademark) (hereafter referred to as an MS) or a memory incorporated in a PD.
However, the recording method in which a music CD is recorded by connecting a CD player with a PD makes it such an editing operation cumbersome as selecting only favorite music titles from two or more music CDs and recording the selected music titles.
It should be noted that use of a personal computer allows the encoding of PCM data recorded in a music CD and storing the encoded data into its hard disk drive and, at the same time, and it is possible to create a copy of the stored encoded data temporarily on an MS or a PD connected to the personal computer. This processing is referred to as check-out processing. The deletion, by the check-out processing, of the copy of the stored encoded data created on an MS or a PD is referred to as check-in processing. The check-out and check-in processing will be detailed later.
Meanwhile, if, in checking out the encoded data stored in a hard disk drive to an MS or a PD, its storage capacity is already full, the user must perform an operation for checking in a copy of the encoded data stored in the MS or the PD and then perform an operation for checking out the encoded data of desired music, thereby presenting a problem of increased operator load.